A season inside the pageantry of college football

By Austin Murphy

From Saturday Rules by Austin Murphy Copyright © 2007 by Austin Murphy. By permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

Courtesy of HarperCollins

February 8, Los Angeles -- Once a year, shortly after National Letter of Intent day, Pete Carroll summons his squad to Heritage Hall and subjects it to a reel of highlights that can be fairly described as Trojan porn: the jaw-dropping feats of incoming All-Americans. While relatively small at 17 players, USC's 2007 recruiting class is unmatched in quality. As it is every year, the message at this meeting is crystalline: Take a good look, because these are the guys who are coming in here to try and take your jobs.

After putting forth this nuanced explanation for his latest boffo recruiting class -- "We got a program that's frikkin' rippin', we got a university that's rippin' and people love to come here!" -- Carroll hands the mike to defensive coordinator Nick Holt, who introduces the squad to defensive end Everson Griffen. Remember the name.

"He's 6'3 ½, 262 pounds. At our camp, he ran 4.56. He already benches 410, power cleans 360," says Holt, who finally loses the battle to keep the excitement out of his voice. "The guy is a FRIKKIN' BEAST!"

Griffen's video highlights are a hit parade, literally, of mismatches. He is a helmeted Godzilla wreaking havoc on innocent teenagers. No less impressive is Servite (Calif.) High linebacker Chris Galippo, who is on the big screen, brutalizing a series of overmatched adolescents while Ken Norton, the linebackers coach, poses rhetorical questions: "Watch number nine right there. Can he run?" Galippo closes like a cheetah on the ballcarrier. "Can he hit?" Several clips answer the question definitively. "Get his ass down," Norton mutters to himself, savoring a punishing Galippo sack. "Can he shoot a gap?" He can.

Todd McNair, who coaches 'SC's running backs, narrates the highlights of Broderick Green. "Linebackers, defensive backs, I hate to do this to you" -- it's clear he delights in it -- "but this guy's 6'1", 230. We're talking physical mismatch." Onscreen Green annihilates a would-be tackler, eliciting another OOOOOooooh from the Trojans. "He is the reincarnation of LenDale. These are my type of guys."

The Trojans then get an eyeful of five-star tailback Marc Tyler, son of ex-NFLer (and former UCLA Bruin) Wendell Tyler. But they save their most unalloyed awe for Joe McKnight, a 6'1", 200-pound package of dynamite snatched by 'SC from under the nose of LSU. McKnight, who runs a 4.3 forty, was recruited by Norton out of John Curtis High, just outside New Orleans. He describes "Sweet Joe" as "silky smooth, fast, and he can catch. He compares favorably to -- dare I say it?" Norton thought better of it. "I won't say it."

Norton is talking, of course, about Reggie Bush, who'd finished his college career with a heartbreaking, last-minute loss to Texas in the '06 Rose Bowl. A month after that game, I sat in a Boulder restaurant with Dan Hawkins, the new head coach at Colorado. I brought up Bush's most memorable play from that Rose Bowl: With his team ahead by a touchdown, the all-cosmos tailback capped off a long run with a bonehead play that will rank right up there with Bill Buckner's boot. As a pair of tacklers converged, Bush lateraled to a walk-on teammate who, not surprisingly, could not keep up with him. The ball ended up on the ground, and Texas recovered. The Trojans lost momentum, and, eventually, the national title.

Bush had been pilloried for that gaffe, so I felt safe piling on. But Hawkins wrongfooted me. "You know what?" he said. "I liked that he did that. He's out there cutting it loose. I tell my guys, 'We're not on this earth for very long. You've got to get out there and sing your song. Do your dance.'"

The Hawk, in that moment, put his finger on what I love about the college game. These guys don't fully realize they are cogs in a multi-billion dollar business. They're still singing their song, still "trailing clouds of glory." That, at least, is how the Hawkins' fellow romantic, William Wordsworth, once described the innocence that attends youth -- an innocence that we lose by adulthood, provoking the poet to ask:

Wither is fled the visionary gleam?
Where is it now, the glory and the dream?

Hint: you won't find it at the Meadowlands.

***************

From 1994 through '98, I covered the League for SI. "Yeah, I know who you are," Dallas Cowboys guard Nate Newton informed me one afternoon, when I re-introduced myself. "You're that preppy motherf----- from Sports Illustrated."

I made plenty of friends in the NFL, including Nate, who became one of my go-to guys, and to whom my heart went out when they sent him away to federal prison in 2001 for dealing massive amounts of marijuana. Nate might empathize when I describe my NFL tenure as a block of hard time.

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